The land has fallen under a blight, and the only way for the four Druid clans to gain power from Gaia and restore balance to the Valley of Life is through the time-honored ritual of... adding up blue mana spheres on the cards before you and spending them to buy more cards with more mana spheres. And, sometimes, victory points.

Game details

Look—don't ask too many questions about the theme. Mystic Vale is a game about healing the land in the same way that Splendor is a game about crafting diamond rings for the nobility. Both titles are essentially pure efficiency engines; build up a pool of resources that will allow you to buy more expensive resources faster than anyone else at the table and you win. There are no extraneous mechanics here to distract from the dopamine drip-drip-drip of steadily increasing card combos, and Mystic Vale has learned the key lesson of these kinds of games: don't overstay your welcome.

Those may sound like backhanded compliments, but they're not; Splendor was a terrific game, a pure engine-building experience that provided satisfying depth in just 30 minutes. Mystic Vale is very much of this school of design, though mechanically it works more like a deck-building card game—with a twist.

Did I mention the twist? In Mystic Vale, you don't build your deck by purchasing new cards; you actually alter the cards in your deck by adding new powers and resources to them in something that publisher AEG calls the "Card Crafting System."

Healing the land

When you open the box for the first time, you will note that Mystic Vale comes with enough plastic to make Gaia weep—somewhat ironic in a game about healing the land. Not only are all the "advancements" plastic, but they slip into plastic sleeves and come coated with an ultra-thin secondary layer of plastic. That's right—you need to remove plastic from the plastic. (Fortunately, my children found this oddly compelling and did it for me.) Extra sleeves are included should you break any.

Each player gets 20 cards, a number that remains constant throughout the game; rather than gain new cards, you simply add advancements to open slots on existing cards. Buying these advancements is simple. Nine of them (plus an always-available stack of cheap Fertile Land cards) are on display in the center of the table. On each turn, players flip over their stack of 20 cards, one at a time, until three "spoil" symbols are visible. If they're feeling lucky, they can press their luck and continue to flip cards—but four spoil symbols will bust the entire hand and force it into the discard pile without providing its typical benefits. (If you spoil, you do gain a consolation prize: one free mana to use on a future turn.)

Assuming you don't spoil, apply the effects and then count up the symbols visible on the cards before you.

Blue-orbed mana lets you purchase new advancements to power up your cards. (You simply need to make sure that the advancement fits into an empty space on the card; you can't over existing advancements.) Shields provide victory points. Green trees cancel red spoil symbols, letting you get more cards into play before spoiling. Nature symbols let you purchase "vale cards," which can provide every-turn benefits or end-game points.

That's... pretty much it. Players take turns until the victory point pool on the table is depleted; at that point, they finish the current round and tabulate final points. If playing with people who know deck-builders like Dominion or Trains, this all takes about five minutes to explain. Run through two or three hands and people will be buying advancements like old pros.

Simple but not simplistic

If it sounds simple, it is; my six-year-old picked it up without trouble (and nearly beat me). Once you get into the flow of the game, turns move with the speed of a Hulking Thornhide (one of the game's advancements). Since you can't spoil until you hit four symbols, the game even encourages you to use your downtime to start flipping cards for your next turn, stopping once you hit three spoil symbols. In a two-player game—which I recommend, as this is true multiplayer solitaire—by the time you've done this, it's usually your turn again.

Enlarge/ Crafting a card. In this case, the only advancements that would fit are "middles," since the top and bottom slots of the base card are already filled.

Nate Anderson

But simple doesn't mean boring. After five or six plays of Mystic Vale, I'm hungry for more. The play happens so fast and the sense of "powering-up" comes so often that it's easy to play on, sitting at the table like a Vegas slot-machine junkie. This is a well-designed, fluid game pared to its essentials.

The trick, of course, is learning the best way to build up your efficiency engine. Which advancement combos work best together (and thus should be on the same card)? When should you turn your focus from building cards that provide more mana (and thus let you buy the most powerful cards more quickly) to cards that provide victory points (which is, after all, the way you win the game)? How heavily should you focus on vale cards vs. advancements?

The card-crafting twist on deck-building might feel a mite gimmicky, but this is a gimmick that works. The system groups Dominion-style effects into a package so that they always come up together, and it's truly satisfying to pull a fully stocked three-advancement card from the top of the deck and look with glee at the resources about to rain down upon you.

The game's artwork—especially on the vale cards—is gorgeous, though it really has no connection to gameplay. (Indeed, Mystic Vale is designed so that you don't even need to see the artwork on the advancements; cards are laid out "such that those without text effects can be overlapped and only the left half of each card needs to be seen," says the manual. In other words—just count up the symbols, which are all that matter.)

As for downsides, the big question is just how deep the game goes. It's a short experience; games often end before I can even use the most powerful advancements a single time, and it can be difficult to craft the combos you truly want. (To add an advancement to a particular card, you need to have that card in play, you need an available advancement with the right effects AND printed in the right location, and you need enough mana to afford it—all on the same turn.)

The current round of card effects also seem unimaginative; most are limited to providing more mana, more victory points, or discarding unwanted cards. Will the game have legs?

The mysterious future

That's hard to say, because the base Mystic Vale game is clearly not the final design of the game or of the Card Crafting System in general. An expansion called Vale of Magic was announced alongside the base game's release (and will be out in October). But more intriguingly, even the Mystic Vale manual talks up the next game in the series as the one to really watch for.

The final interior page of the manual is an ad for Edge of Darkness, a forthcoming game from the designer of Mystic Vale that will combine "aspects of worker placement, deck building, and fast-paced combat with the Card Crafting System that debuts in Mystic Vale." The new game will be "AEG's most ambitious, deluxe, tabletop gaming experience ever." Mystic Vale thus appears to be an introduction to the Card Crafting System as much as a standalone title.

For now, though, what we have is Mystic Vale itself, a tight engine-builder that excels at what it does. Whether what it does excites you depends on your personality, but if you're a gamer who enjoys Splendor-style light-to-middleweight play, this could easily find a productive place in your collection.